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Monday, October 31, 2016

I’m doing what I have to, which is to say that I cannot read
Facebook, El Nuevo Día, or The New
York Times anymore.

I feel bad….wait, I’m not sure I do. I think I should be
able to handle, after all. the news that the FBI director decided, having had
the newly discovered….

Oh, wait…they really weren’t newly discovered, since the
emails were discovered in either September or October. Why am I not certain?
Because the Washington Post is my source, and they only give me five free
articles per month. But here’s the link,
in case you haven’t read your way through the Post….

Now, where was I? Well, time to look elsewhere besides the
Clinton campaign, or in fact either campaign, though both are slightly
worrisome to contemplate. What happens if Hillary wins, and then the FBI
decides that finally it has the smoking gun it needs to take her to trial? Of
course, she wouldn’t be the only one, since Trump too could be sitting in a
courtroom when he should be thinking about running the country. But instead, on
December 16 of this year, he or his lawyers will be in a New York courthouse on
charges of raping a 13-year old girl. This one I know about, since The Guardian
isn’t as stingy as the Washington Post….

So that’s wonderful: now both candidates and the future
winner will be behind bars, which would be OK, except that, well…

Well, by definition, the winner of the presidential election
does not put his opponent in prison. True—that’s a long-standing tradition in
some countries, but not for us. So if it’s Hillary who gets thrown into the
jug, then I know what all of us supporters will do: we’ll burn up Facebook with
scathing comments, and oh! How mortified the Trumpites will be! Hah! Take that!

What I don’t know, of course, is what will happen if Hillary
wins. Because all of those guys, you know, have a zillion weapons, and why do I
think that they’re going to resort to Facebook, when they have the AK-47 (or
whatever it is) all oiled up?

And of course, they have every reason to be testy, since
Donald did tell them—I just ran into this—that 1.8 million dead people are
registered to vote, and some of them will be! That, by the way, came from the
Daily Kos, and an article from Oct 22, 2016, entitled “Donald Trump Plans 100
Days of Bloody Vengeance, Promises to Sue Women Who Accused Him.” I tell you
all of this because the Daily Kos is happy to let me read it, but won’t let me
hyperlink it. Probably just the hand of one of those 1.8 million dead people….

So now, of course, I have to worry about that, and hope that
whatever legal process ensues doesn’t work its way up to the Supreme Court,
since guess what? It turns out that Clarence Thomas is in trouble again, since
an Alaska lawyer, who was a Truman Scholar, claims that Thomas
groped her in 1999. Well, Thomas says it isn’t so, but then again, he also
said he hadn’t put the hair-from-down-there on the Coke can. And I have a
problem with that, because guess what? I’m a guy, but also gay, so can I say
that none of the women I have ever met could conceivably imagine such a thing?
Sorry to betray my sex, here, but really….

Well, anyway, I could deal with all of this, if I didn’t
have to deal with the Water Protectors, since what’s going on in North Dakota?
In fact, I know what’s going on in North Dakota, since my family had some land
up there. So I’ve been following the fracking issue for a decade, now, and it
was no surprise that, having rather violently forced the oil out of the ground,
they then had to do something about it. And so was it the North Dakotans fault
that, having turfed the Indians out of what was then more desirable land, those
same Indians (OK—their descendants) should be sitting on top of an oil field?

Well, well—I puzzle my head about this, because in fact I
have been to North Dakota, and seen the land. In fact, it is easy to see
the land, because on a clear day up on the Canada boarder, you can see the
Turtle “Mountains” down there in South Dakota. So that’s to say that if the
world isn’t flat, the Dakotas certainly are. So I puzzle about this designation
of the Dakotas as “sacred,” but then again, a lot about Native Americans—sorry,
now to be called First Nations—leaves me cold. Though I will say that the
Winnebago tribe—now known as Ho-Chunk—afforded me my only successful experience
of dancing. We were up on the reservation, my friend Dorothy and I, and we
joined in the dance, having been invited to by a Ho-Chunk man as lubricated as
we. And so we quickly learned the dance—stomp two times, shuffle to the left;
stomp two times, shuffle to the right. In fact, we had quite a go of it. But if
the dancing leaves something to be desired, is it really justified to bring out
the dogs and the paid-thugs to seize control of the land? Couldn’t we go back
to more subtle approaches, like distributing smallpox infested blankets to the
tribe?

So that’s where we’ve come to: two presidential candidates
headed for the hoosegow, a supreme court justice who may or may not have groped
an Intern in 1999, and the whole nation watching a slow massacre up in North
Dakota. And of course, the news is hardly any better here, since on Friday, the
Secretary of Health, Ana Ruis, announced the birth of the first baby born with
microcephaly, as a result of the Zika virus. The baby—thanks for asking—is
doing as well as can be expected, which sounds like…well, not so well. Auditory
and visual problems, and probably neurological complications, as well. So
that’s unfortunate, since we will probably have somewhere near or above 200
similarly affected babies by the middle of next year. Oh, and it’s going to
rain all this week, so maybe that number will rise to 300.

Or maybe not, since nobody can say that we aren’t taking
this seriously, since I saw it from the bus with my own eyes. The bus, you see,
leaves the charming Colonial city and goes through the projects, and one of the
ruins in front of the projects is an old store. It’s now roofless, but it does
have plenty of old tires, flower pots, containers, etc. So the Health
Department came by, and boy! Did they take action! Yes, every available wall
was plastered with the news: Criadero de
Mosquitos, or Mosquito Hatching Ground. Of course, no one actually cleaned
up the hatching ground—that would be
meticuloso, or finicky—but who needed to? Now that everyone was warned,
they all knew to stay away! See?

In fact, I wish they had done the same for me. I should have
been warned, somehow, when I left the apartment this morning that I was
entering a criadero of…what? News
spiraling out of control? Lunacy unleashed on the world? Madness run rampant?

They’re supposed to tell you, you know. They have to give
you papers, and then you have the right to go before the judge. I mean, I thought
I was taking the drugs the shrink gave me, but maybe I got confused. Or maybe—a
little paranoia, here—they switched around the medicine. Sometimes they do
that, you know. Anyway, it’s completely, completely unfair that…

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!